Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Well I've been playing with Python for Series 60 for a couple of hours now, and I'm in love. It is so much easier to use than Java ME to do the stuff I want to do that I've already hacked up a couple of quick useful applications, and I can see possibilites for eSTAR as well. After using the application I'm guessing the reason that Nokia went with Python rather than Perl is the console, it seems to make sense to have it around. Apart from PDL Perl doesn't really have a console, although it'd be pretty trivial implement one...

For those of you who might be interested in developing on Mac OS X, it looks like the only useful thing we're missing is the py2sis application from the SDK which is a Windows only tool.

If you're interesting in using the Bluetooth console facility to develop directly on the phone under Mac OS X, this is fairly trivially done. First of all you need to create a serial port that the bt_console.py script on the phone can connect to using the Bluetooth Serial Utility which is found in Applications > Utilities. Then you need to run a terminal emulation program on you Mac to monitor your newly created port, I'm using ZTerm to do that. Then just run the bt_console.py script on your phone as normal.

Update: I've now got xmllibrpc.py and PyBlogger working under Python for Series 60. Wasn't particulaarly hard to do either, which suprised me...

Update: A version of Perl for Symbian/Series 60 has now been released...

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.